This Car Has My Favorite Song!

Yesterday we bought a new car.  In addition to the fact that our five-passenger ’96 Pathfinder could no longer fit our entire family, it was beginning to act squirrelly.  When I spotted wisps of smoke curling out from under the hood as I pulled it into the parking lot of the car dealership that last time, I was good and ready to let that car go.  We have had it for twelve years and it has served us well, but it was time for something bigger…and newer.

I often joke about computers and gadgets thinking they are smarter than I am.  With sixteen computers on board, my new car probably is smarter than I am.  It monitors everything from tire pressure and gas consumption to outside air temperature and road conditions.  This morning the car told me “Ice possible, drive with caution.”  It turns the headlights on for you when it gets dark and turns them off when it gets light again.  It has a lane change blinker that blinks four times and then turns itself off and although I think it is retarded, it is probably handy for the blinker impaired.  You know who I’m talking about: the people who signal to change lanes and 60 miles later are still letting everyone know that they changed lanes half an hour ago.  This car takes so much responsibility off the driver that I wonder if I could just lay the seat back and take a nap while the car drives me to Hobby Lobby…

I still know how to drive, but I really don’t know how to run this car.  There are about two hundred buttons on the console.  And there are versions of this car that are fancier than the one we bought!  I’m actually going to have to read the instruction manual rather than just sitting in the driver’s seat and pushing all the buttons to see what they do.  Although that could be fun to, just as long as I could figure out how to fix anything I screwed up.

And those of you who know Matthew well won’t be surprised that he coined the phrase that I’ve used as the title of this post.  As we were driving the car home for the very first time, Matthew happily buckled into the third row seat, Kev turned on a Rockapella CD and Matthew exclaimed, “This car has my favorite song!”